Probably because herd immunity is what would normally end a pandemic like this one, and the idea of stopping a respiratory disease with characteristics so unfavourable to any kind of containment as Covid-19 is basically completely unprecedented and untested. Staying home and/or wearing masks for a couple of months is absolutely not close to enough - most of Europe already tried that, and all it did was delay things for a few months at vast, unbelievable costs.

If these stats are accurate, Slovakia was testing between a couple of thousand people a day to as low as 41 people during June. It's not terribly surprising that they'd be reporting zero new cases per day on many days during June with that level of testing, especially if the tests were less than ideally targetted.

Presumably intended to do something about all the viral tweets contradicted by the very article they linked. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of those being started and spread by journalists who should already know better, so the question is whether they'll take any notice of the warning or just be too arrogant to think it applies to such clever, important individuals as themselves.

Except that it's not really a proper workstation card, because it has the same driver limitations designed to stop it from running proper workstation applications well that their gaming cards do. It's effectively a very high-end gaming card at a professional workstation card price.

The number of cases reported by South Korea isn't comparable to other countries because they're massively undertesting by current-day standards - something like a tenth the number of per-capita Covid-19 tests a day as in the US and most big European states, with people discouraged from getting tested merely because they have potential symptoms. This means they can't actually detect infections that aren't linked to ones they know about very well, and we know those infections have been rapidly expanding because despite this an increasing proportion of the cases they do detect have no ties to any known case.

No, it's about partisanship. In particular, the Scientific American editors' argument for why the US would be doing better if not for the evil science-rejecting Trump is a load of partisan horseshit: "Testing people for the virus, and tracing those they may have infected, is how countries in Europe and Asia have gained control over their outbreaks, saved lives, and successfully reopened businesses and schools."

There's really obvious factual problems with this. Firstly, the virus is not under control in Europe or most of Asia, and ceased to be so the moment they reopened their schools and businesses - even South Korea is having huge problems and ended up reclosing a lot of their schools. Europe is especially bad - right now they're seeing the kind of rebound the article goes on to imply is unique to the US thanks to Trump, except the outbreaks are growing here. (If recent trends continue, soon several European countries will each have more cases each than the entire US.) Secondly, pretty much every country in Europe and Asia has actually been testing substantially less people per capita than the US for several months now, especially South Korea. The only time most European countries were carrying out more testing than the US was back during their initial wave of cases, and with one or two exceptions like Germany those extra tests were almost entirely consumed testing all the extra people being hospitalized with symptoms due to their larger outbreaks - they couldn't carry out widespread testing of people with symptoms, and were actually well behind the US in reaching the scale of testing required to make this possible. Our news coverage has to keep warning against comparing case numbers then and now because so few cases were detected back then. (This is about the only time it would make sense to use test positivity figures to compare how well countries were doing in testing, and it just so happens to be the one time the media doesn't compare the US with others that way.)

They then go on to push this even more partisan nonsense: "The states that followed Trump's misguidance posted new daily highs and higher percentages of positive tests than those that did not. By early July several hospitals in Texas were full of COVID-19 patients." There is no such clear divide - it's a media illusion created by partisan cherrypicking. California, the big left-wing state, is doing about as badly as Texas despite following all the supposedly-correct advice that right-wing states are supposedly ignoring due to Trump. It's just that outbreaks in right-wing states get heavily played up in the media in order to push a narrative. You can pick out non-Trump states that are doing better, but you can also pick out Trump-supporting ones that are about equivalent just as easily.

There's been a major push by the mainstream media and people like Fauci to spin how New York handled this as being a massive success story rather than a failure, again presumably for partisan reasons. The usual argument is that sure, they had a load of deaths at first, but they managed to pull together and bring down cases hard. This is also a load of horseshit - the rapid decline in cases was really fucking obviously enabled by New York letting a huge chunk of the population get infected in the first place. In particular, the big problem we're having over here in the UK is keeping cases under control in poor, dense urban areas, and if you look at New York City's antibody testing figures - as high as 50% positive in the worst-affected area, with multiple poorer areas well into the 30s and 40s - it's obvious that they had major help from the fact that a huge proportion of the population there had been infected and gained immunity.

Which, of course, also makes this part of the Scientific American piece really cynical partisanship: "These lapses accelerated the spread of disease through the country—particularly in highly vulnerable communities that include people of color, where deaths climbed disproportionately to those in the rest of the population."

The Australian government realised something like this might happen... which is why they added a provision that if Facebook and Google carry any news sites there at all, they have to carry the big Australian ones covered by this law and have to pay them money. It really is an astoundingly blatant shakedown aimed at transferring money to big media corporations that helped the current government get elected (or at least one big media corporation).

Effective contact tracing, sure. South Korea's fabled mass testing, however, has been testing something like a tenth or a twentieth as many people relative to the size of the population as the supposedly tiny, failing US and UK testing programs - it's just the press in both countries has been doing its level best to obfuscate that fact. (Last I heard, they weren't exactly encouraging people with potential symptoms to get tested in most cases either - testing was technically available to everyone if they paid out of pocket for it, but that probably relies on most people not actually taking it up.)

Not only does more testing lead to more cases being counted, the freaking New York Times ran an article the other day that used this to trick readers into thinking that the US had an outbreak five times bigger than all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia combined, and it was all Trump's fault for making the US a unique failure. (Except for the UK those countries have much smaller testing programs than the US - and crucially, they also had vastly smaller testing programs when the really big outbreaks happened. The European countries with the big, healthcare-system-overwhelming outbreaks were pretty much only testing hospitalized people during them, and even testing success story South Korea wasn't offering testing to people with potential symptoms unless they were also contacts of known cases. Canny New York Times readers, of course, all believe the US is testing less than everyone else thanks to some careful reporting. There are also a plethora of other cheap tricks in that article, like comparing Florida's cases during their peak with Spain's right at the very start of their second exponential explosion to sucker people into thinking Florida was more at risk of an outbreak, when in reality their cases were on the decline. They even had the sheer brass balls to claim that the statistics which didn't fit into that narrative were the misleading ones.)

It'll have an impact alright, it's just not clear that it'll be a good one overall. Sure, if you happen test them at the exact right time it might be possible to warn them before they develop symptoms... but test too early, and people will get false negatives and might think they're in the clear, go out and infect others. Basically, testing people who're exposed to Covid-19 doesn't give them much in the way of actionable information, since they should really be self-isolating for a while no matter what. (Also, the CDC can't just work out when the right time is and test everyone then like the article is suggesting because there isn't some fixed deterministic point when people start testing positive or develop symptoms - it varies, a lot, and if I remember rightly the useful pre-symptomatic window for testing isn't particularly large.)

"A bit more potent" is an understatement. As I understand it, the vaccine-derived virus can fairly easily mutate to be as virulent and deadly as the original wild-type poliovirus was and has in fact done so, making elimination of the wild-type virus more of an obscure trivia fact than the major victory against paralytic polio this article tries to spin it as. The virus is still out there in Africa, just as dangerous as ever, except now genetic sequencing reveals that it came from the vaccine rather than the wild. I believe there is some research attempting to develop live polio vaccines that can't so easily regain virulence, but it hasn't translated into an actual working vaccination program yet.

Even in Africa, it's not really gone. There's a really crucial caveat in the headline that isn't properly explained: "free from wild polio". You see, the polio vaccine used in the elimination program is a live vaccine containing weakened poliovirus, and for some time now almost all of the polio infections and related cases of paralysis in Africa have been from vaccine-derived poliovirus which has circulated in the community long enough to reverse the mutations that weakened it and made it safe to vacinate with. This circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus hasn't been eliminated, and spreads from person to person just like the wild version, and paralyzes just like the wild version - only genetic testing reveals that it came from the vaccination program rather than the original wild-type virus. The New York Times article is a little better. (Though the other thorny problem that it doesn't mention is that the unmutated vaccine also occasionally causes paralysis, which makes just continuing to vaccinate indefinitely unattractive.)

I'm pretty sure there have been other suspected reinfections where the viral DNA was sequenced both times around and turned out to be exactly identical - some countries have been looking for cases like this for I think months, they just haven't found one until now. Also, South Korea found that the people there who tested positive again didn't have any viable virus that could infect cells the second time around, which suggests those apparent reinfections were likely to be testing artifacts and genuine reinfection is rare.

I don't think it even makes sense to use per-capita comparisons here. Remember, it only takes one infected traveller to start a cluster of infections, and it only takes one cluster slipping through the net to cause containment efforts to fail altogether. So it's going to be the total number of travellers that affects how feasible New Zealand-style elimination and exclusion of the virus actually is, and the fact that this makes it look like larger countries will have a harder time is just a reflection of reality.

New Zealand's GDP figures for the second quarter don't actually seem to be out yet (it looks like they were released in September last year) - the 1.6% drop you're quoting is for their first quarter, which was almost entirely before the lockdown. The figures for other countries that you're quoting all seem to be from the second quarter. No shit, if you compare the drop in GDP for a quarter where there weren't lockdowns everywhere to other countries' drop in GDP for a quarter where there was there's going to be a big difference.